Love Letters of the Angels of Death

by Jennifer Quist

  “Come on, Brigs. We each have to come to terms with the physical limitations of our sex someday.”

  Here at the hospital, at the end, they’ve got you doped up on something. You’re brushing cobwebs off your face that just aren’t there. I ask you if it still hurts and you grab me by the shirt, pull me into you, and then throw me back again. I’m not sure if you can still talk.

  I asked you once about that new thing they do where they thread a tube into the spine and shut everything down from the middle of your back to the tips of your plain pink toenails. It sounds pretty good to me.

  “It would,” is what you said at the time. “If men birthed their babies themselves, that’s the kind of technology that would have been invented before the frickin’ wheel.”

  I thought you meant you wanted to have it done yourself.

  But then you just got even madder. “How can you suggest that I call a man in a white coat to alienate me from my body precisely at the point in time when it’s at its most powerful?”

  That was your last word on it. Maybe I should have asked you if it would still be patriarchal violence if the doctor who did it was a woman. But I didn’t. It felt like a landmine at the time. And I think it’s too late to mention it to any of the hospital people now – even though it’s getting harder and harder to keep all this fear off my face when you look at me.

  And now in the hospital, after all these weeks, you’re not angry anymore – and it’s really scaring me. You’re not even angry at the nurse, standing on the opposite side of the bed-chair thing from me yelling, “Push harder, push harder,” right into your face for two hours straight – like you’ve got something more important to do later in the day and you’re trying to save your strength for it.

  “Lady,” I finally have to say. “Cool it, okay?”

  We’ve been here almost a whole day and I think I’m getting good at reading the output from the electronic fetal monitor. You’ll tell me later you’ve got a post-traumatic stress reaction to the sound pounding out of the machine.

  Kee-ow-wow-wow-wow, Kee-ow-wow-wow-wow

  I ask the doctor if the strength of your contractions will ever get stronger again after they start to wane, like I can see yours are doing. He says, no.

  You want to tell me you’re dying. Somehow, I know that’s what you’d say to me if you could. And if you told me so yourself, out loud, I would believe you. I can see it’s true in your face, where a thousand tiny, rusty bruises have bloomed – as if the pores in your skin are about to start bleeding, right around your eyes.

  But instead of letting you die, they call this old specialist doctor. He comes into the hospital room with a set of long, curved tongs like something from the Inquisition. He cuts and thrusts and pulls and out comes the whole thing. That’s when I know for sure you can’t talk – not with language anyway. Your voice is a landslide.

  There must be seven people in the room by the end, all twitching for disaster, tearing open packages, rubbing, sucking, and making the same notes over and over again.

  “No. No again. No, she’s still not allergic to anything.”

  When they give me the lavender baby I walk it over to where they’re sewing your birth canal back together for me with a long, fish-hook needle each of us is taking pains not to look at. The baby is a boy, like you wanted. He’s wide awake.

  Your voice is wordy again but low and wrapped in cotton. “I couldn’t see,” you say to me. “I couldn’t see anything. Did you get to cut it?”

  At least I have this to give you. “No.”

  And that – for the first time in this, the longest of all the days of creation – is when you cry.

  Maybe it would have been easier at first if the baby had been born as a dinosaur out of your pterodactyl egg – a gigantic, toothy reptile that could walk and forage and lapse into sleepy, cold-blooded stasis without much help from you. But he’s far too big for that. Instead, he’s come to you like an eclipse of the sun – more vast than anything, crushing you into the gravity of the endless revolutions of his need.

  Of course, you understand what it all means before I do. He’s still just barely born when I notice you won’t say his name above a whisper in the hospital in case the nurses or the janitors or – anybody – hears you.

  “It doesn’t seem right for us to be able to just start calling him whatever we want,” you say. “Our name for him – it’s so arbitrary. I mean, we just made it up.”

  I remind you of what you told me once about our names being social constructs. “It’s how we show he belongs to us, remember? Out on the bridge that night?” I pause to assemble your old arguments. “Our names only exist outside ourselves. We don’t even bother to use our names in our dreams, when we’re asleep. Right?”

  But you still look a little scared as you shrug one shoulder. Me and the baby – we’ve each changed your name. When we got married, I got you to abandon the surname you’d been known by for your first twenty-one years. And without a word, the baby now demands that you call yourself something like “Mom.” He’s taken everything. Even a real dinosaur would have spared more.

  At home, after dark, you are a ghost – a small, pale ghost rising from my bed in the night; walking over the carpet with bare, white feet; twisting the door knobs in the dark; grappling with the mass of snuffling, sticky humanity I call “Scottie” in the daylight – as if I know him. You stand away from me, in the quiet of the living room, swaying with the baby in the dark until the shabby apartment carpet starts to close over your toes and heels. The hallucination startles you awake on your feet, over and over again.

  In the morning, when I ask how you’ve both slept, you tell me – hour by hour – how it all passed. And I listen, trying to stop my features from forming into the blank, sceptical face of any grown man listening to a ghost story.

  “This nursing thing has got to be a sham,” you tell me. “Feel my breast. No – not like that. Like this. Do you feel that? It’s not full of milk. It’s packed with pebbles.”

  “No, no.” I make a bright protest. “Look at how well he’s growing. You can’t build a boy like that out of pebbles.”

  You bend to kiss the baby’s silky head where he lies on the bed between us, waving his hands and fanning his fingers as if he’s trying to maintain some kind of complicated magic spell over us. I don’t know how you can keep from hating him, and I’m always relieved to see you kiss him or make some other kind of small display of your unlikely affection for him. Sometimes, I worry that it’s all just Stockholm Syndrome. But then I decide that, for now, Stockholm Syndrome will do well enough.

  Outside the apartment, there are term papers for me to write about fluid dynamics and kinematic determinacy. There are study groups full of paper cups and expensive calculators. There are labs and lecture halls – hard math classes and hard math classes called by other names. So I leave you, all day long. And for all but a few harried hours in the evening, my life looks remarkably similar to the one I lived before the eclipse of the sun – the end of your world.

  You mourn your lost self. She leaks out in millilitres from your eyes every day at three o’clock in the afternoon.

  “She’s gone for good and as good as dead,” you tell me. “She’s gone and I never realized before how much I loved her.”

  Remember how badly it all scared me? Remember how I hid all the Radiohead CDs and looked up the number for the postpartum help hotline in the telephone book?

  “Don’t be stupid,” you say as you push the phone book back against my chest. “I’d be more worried about my state of mind if something like this failed to upset me.” And you show me a reference to something with the diminutive, flippant label of “baby blues” in the index of our dog-eared pregnancy and childbirth manual.

  In all the years that follow, we never speak about the afternoon when you nurse the baby to sleep on our bed, tuck yourself back into yo
ur clothes, kiss my face, and tell me you’re going out to buy bread and eggs. You drive to the grocery store, walk the aisles, pay our money – but you don’t come home. You steer the car all the way through the city until you find an unfamiliar stretch of freeway charging northward. It leads you past the greasy architecture of the eastside refineries, the candy striped smoke stacks, the flaming orange gas flares.

  Finally, the road splits. You choose the obscure exit and end up crossing a railway track, bouncing onto the gravel road leading between barbed wire gates and into an enormous garbage dump. This is the landfill we and our one million closest neighbours have been packing with our refuse. Our little car bangs in and out of the deep, sun-hardened mud ruts in the roadway. Behind the gates, you drive over the massive weigh scale – “dead slow,” the sign says. You are weighed and measured and, you have no doubt, found wanting.

  And in the household refuse rubble field, at the edge of the mound of bedsprings, Chinese particle board, and black plastic, you cut the engine and step out of the car.

  The air reeks like the inside of a warm, dirty refrigerator, but you sit on the edge of the hood, right out in the open anyway. The dump is patrolled by ravens too big and bearded to be mistaken for common crows. They’re the kind of birds we usually only see in the mountains or way up north. You watch them tossing and tearing plastic bags with the long knives of their black beaks. You’re wondering where their chicks are right now. None of the birds on the trash mounds look anything but old and hoary. Maybe there are no such thing as raven chicks, and the birds just spring to life without any infancy – incarnated fully grown from tattered black garbage bags caught in tree branches and held there, rustling through enough winters to be blown into enormous, shaggy birds.

  The weary beeping of bulldozers’ back-up signals sound from behind the incomprehensible trash-mountain heaped in front of our car. Some of the ravens answer back a mimicking cry. Their voices make you smile – even though you know they’re carrion birds and they’d merrily strip your body down to its bare bones if you sat too still for too long.

  You stay there, perched on the hood of our car parked on the sandy ground in front of the trash-mountain, until your breasts ache and harden beneath your tightly folded arms. It tingles and stings, as if you can feel each of the rough, tiny crystals that move though the glands and ducts beneath your skin. Maybe you could stay there, behind the barbed gates, until the milk runs down through the fabric of your shirt and onto your arms, along the metal curves of the car, dripping to where it would fall to darken the dirt below you. You wouldn’t need to cut yourself to spill it. The milk drains out of your body all the same, through openings in your skin that you can’t even see – smaller than pores. You always said your milk was so pretty – like liquefied ivory when it stood on our newborns’ fuzzy cheeks. It’s probably the same colour as the bones from which it was drawn – your bones, delicate and beautiful and unsee-able except for the bits of them suspended in your milk.

  You’ll never tell me how you thought about doing it – about sitting dead still on the hood of the car. Maybe, in time, the ravens would have forgotten what you really were – and you would have stopped worrying about it. And the birds would have come hopping toward you, moving sideways, peering at you around their broad blind spots with each of their shiny, black eyes in turn. But even if they mistook you for dead, they wouldn’t have eaten you – not your flesh. They would have inched close enough to peck at the ground where your milk would have been spilt in the dirt, still warm – great, shaggy black birds swallowing, brown grit and ivory milk, all at once.

  You don’t stay in the city dump long enough to find out any of this. You come back to us – to the baby and me and the future full of his brothers. I hope I know why – but I can never be sure.

  It’s been hours since you left. Still, I don’t ask any dangerous questions about where you’ve been. “Did you enjoy your break?” is what I decide to say in the cheerful voice I’ve been practicing.

  Even this makes you wince. Your arms are outstretched anyway. “Give him here. He needs to eat.”

  “He’s not crying – ”

  You’re pulling at your clothes anyway. “Well, I need him to eat. I guess this relationship isn’t quite perfectly parasitic.”

  You take the baby and sit down on the couch, bending yourself into your typical, awkward nursing posture that made all the lactation consultants frown. There’s a pillow across your lap, your spine is stooped so your head sits too far forward, one of your elbows is thrust out at me like a lesser-than sign, and you’re offering yourself to our child.

  And even through every offering you make, we both know the baby himself is not really an idol. He’s just an altar – a place to lay sacrifices. The sacrifice you make here is so profound I’ve never dared to mention my own – real but lost and invisible in the face of the cataclysm of your new motherhood. But the look of sameness in the routine of my life is not real. I have laid something precious on the altar of the baby too. My own sacrifice – it was you.

  Twenty-Two

  He’s stooped over the plain white sink, washing his hands from the last throat swab of the day when his receptionist leans into the exam room. “I am so sorry,” she begins, “but we’ve got a bit of a problem out front.”

  He raises his head but doesn’t look at her – he never looks directly at them. “Hm?”

  “There’s this – lady – sitting right up on top of the appointment desk. I’m pretty sure she’s not a patient but she’s come barging into the clinic right at closing, no appointment or anything, and tells me you have to see her, right now.”

  “Not a patient.” He repeats it as if he already understands.

  He’s still wiping his hands on a paper towel as the receptionist tells him the name of Brigs’s wife. Someone from their old high school class has already been into this doctor’s clinic that morning for a prenatal appointment. That was where the doctor had been sitting – bent over, rubber-gloved, stunned, and penned between the stirrups of an exam table – when he first heard what happened to Brigs, a man he only met once, a man married to someone he used to love. Since then, the doctor has had this feeling, all day long, like he should be expecting a visit.

  The receptionist sees the doctor’s throat ripple beneath his nodding head.

  “I can always send her away,” she offers. “I told her I wasn’t sure if you’d left for the day or not. I can go tell her it’s too late –”

  “No.” He shakes his head. “It’s okay. Send her into my office.”

  He crosses the hall, flicks on the brass lamp his wife bought him for Father’s Day, and sits down behind stacks of drug manuals, bending himself into a wheeled leather chair a lot like the one in Brigs’s office. He takes in a deep breath, closes his eyes, and tips his head back as he exhales, like a meditation.

  That’s how Brigs’s wife finds the doctor – her once and former prom date – when she comes to stand in the open doorway of his office, her feet apart, her hands on her hips. “What are we doing in here, Dan?” she’s demanding.

  He jolts. “Carrie – hi. This is my office, where I do counselling.”

  “Well, get up,” Carrie says, lunging forward and pushing the arm of his chair hard enough to spin it a half-turn away from her. “We need to be in an exam room for this.”

  As he rises, she’s already twisting the knob of a numbered door in the wall beside his office. “This one will do, right?”

  He’s behind her. “Sure.”

  “Good.” The door swings open with a bang.

  “Yeah, I heard what happened – with your husband’s accident. I can’t begin to say how sorry I am.”

  “Thanks.” She’s standing in the centre of the tiny room – between the padded, papered table and another one of those tiny, white sinks – scanning the countertops as if she’s looking for something.

  “Hey,” h
e says, closing the door. “I feel like you want me to do something for you besides be sorry. But I’d rather not try to guess what it is. You can just tell me.”

  “Can I?” She pulls open a drawer in the small cabinet bolted to the floor. It’s one of the old ones from when the clinic was new. It’s made of tin and painted with white enamel. Its top drawer is full of individually wrapped alcohol swabs and long, wooden Q-tips in sterile packages.

  He doesn’t interfere as she opens a second drawer. “Look, Carrie, I know you must be devastated. And I want to help you. But I can’t do anything if you just keep ransacking my clinic without actually talking to me.”

  She grasps the handle of the last unopened drawer in the cabinet. It doesn’t move. “Locked,” she says. “This must be the right one then. Where’s the key, Dan?”

  “You have to tell me what you’re looking for.”

  She sighs and rolls her head from one shoulder to the other. “Okay, I need a good scalpel – not one of those hack jobs like they gave us to use in zoology labs back in school. I need a good one like you’d use to operate on a real person.”

  He answers with a tense, unvoiced laugh.

  “And I might need some advice too,” she continues. “I mean, I imagine it’s probably a lot like de-boning a chicken. But I’ve never exactly done this sort of thing before – on a person.”

  “What? You mean – surgery?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  That disorienting feeling she used to give him in high school is coming back to him now. Here is it again – the same almost giddy exhaustion and confusion she always trailed behind herself when it came to him. And he’s defending himself against it the same way he always did in the past: by patronizing her.